Richard Nixon, Hopeless Romantic

His first base was in the capital of New Caledonia, Noumea, a crucial seat for the Allied forces that had fought off Japan’s advances toward Australia, New Zealand and the Solomon Islands. The city was set on a hilly peninsula in the southeast end of the island. One Sunday Dick and several friends rode a jeep into the lush, stream-filled mountains that surrounded the base, amid shining blue butterflies and exquisite flora. “You rode along with me all the way,” he wrote Pat. “I think of you when I see beautiful things.” To bring her closer, he enclosed in his letter samples of some of the attractive and unique vegetation and the red berries he found along the way.

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In September 1943, flying at 10,000 feet overlooking the South Pacific islands and the ocean, he did not have time to complete a full letter, but wanted her to know that “I love you just the same up here as down below.” The next morning when the sun came up, he flew above the clouds and saw a spectacular sunrise. He missed her then, but assured her, “We will see sunrises from the air together—and I hope very soon.”

With dull work and too much time on his hands, he was often miserable. He urged his wife to “get good dinners, see lots of shows, buy nice clothes, have your hair fixed—and anything else you want or need,” hoping that she could “make up for me here. … It will make me feel swell to think of you having some enjoyment.”

On August 24, from his new post on Vella Lavella, an island in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, Dick complained to Pat about how “the damn central office” seemed to thwart his attempts to get closer to the action. He yearned to move to a “less civilized place, where I would feel I was doing more.” In a request certain to scare a wartime wife, he added, “I am working on an angle. … Keep your fingers crossed and wish hard!” Pat wanted her husband to do worthwhile and rewarding work, but that didn’t mean she wanted him closer to Japanese bombing.

Restless, in January 1944 Dick wangled a post in Bougainville, the biggest of the Solomon Islands, where, not long after his arrival on the island, the Japanese attacked. “One night it was pretty close,” he remembered. “This plane … had come in very low. We heard the bombs dropping as they came down the runway. We dived out of our tent into the foxhole. As soon as we got out, we saw that our whole tent had been sprayed with bullets. It was a close one.” Downplaying the danger for his edgy wife, he wrote, “It isn’t really as bad as it sounds and the danger is very small. The only casualties are among those who refuse to get up and go in a foxhole and there are few people like that.”

Now styled “Nick” Nixon by his comrades, the 33-year-old lieutenant felt loosed from the restrictions of his previous sheltered civilian life. Living in close quarters with a wide variety of working-class mates, he took up drinking, swearing, smoking cigars and poker, which he mastered. Dick learned that he was a good bluffer, a skill he would later find useful in politics. On July 4, 1944, he wrote Pat that at poker he had “won over a thousand to date.”

In one letter that foreshadowed the isolation and self-absorption of his years in the White House, Dick wrote Pat, “I’m anti-social, I guess, but except for you—I’d rather be by myself as a steady diet rather than with most any of the people I know. … I like to do what I want when I want. Only where you are concerned do I feel otherwise—Dear One.”

Outwardly affable, he was popular with his fellow servicemen of all stripes, but he still had the heart of a loner. At the same time, Dick felt at home operating in a community of men. Biographer Stephen Ambrose points out that the rigid structure of the Navy hierarchy temporarily freed Dick from the urgency of his ambition, allowing him an easier sociability than he had previously enjoyed: “[No one] below him was a threat and no one above him was a block to his advancement.”

This story is an adapted excerpt from Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage, published by Threshold Editions

He formed a close friendship with Lt. James B. Stewart, with whom he spent hours relaxing while sitting on a veranda overlooking the ocean. Dick confided to Stewart about his relationship with Pat (revealing that she was the only woman he had ever slept with), his feelings about the conduct of the war and his thoughts about the future of the country.

Dick used his connections as a Navy supply officer to procure food and drink that his fellow combatants sorely missed. A “first rate scrounger,” as he called himself; he would swap anything with other units to obtain supplies for his men. He endeared himself to them by opening “Nick’s Hamburger Stand,” also known as “Nick’s Snack Shack,” where fighter pilots passing through the island could stop for a free, rejuvenating Australian beer, fresh, cold pineapple juice, good old American hamburgers and a bit of much-needed camaraderie. Dick wrote Pat that he had gone to a Cary Grant movie with several pilots, who appreciated the “Snack Shop, etc. We have had toasted hamburger sandwiches for them for the past two weeks—with cold juice or coffee. That’s making a big hit as you can imagine.”

Fantasizing about the future with Pat soothed him. “Dear one—what fun we could have on a farm!” he wrote her. “Dogs, horses, snow—and somebody to do the work! Whatever it is, whatever you do, it will be wonderful to be with you again. I love you so very very much right this minute.” On March 17, 1944 (her 32nd birthday), he happily remembered that it was the sixth anniversary of the first time that he had sent her flowers, and that a few days later they had traveled together to have dinner at a restaurant called Bird’s in Laguna, California. “For all the years to come—your birthdays will be reminders of our happiness and my love for you.” He would indeed honor her future birthdays.

Both Dick and Pat fretted over the constant possibility that Dick would die in war. The previous December, Pat had felt particularly unsettled. She had not heard from Dick in nearly a month and did not know what kind of danger he faced. She turned down several invitations from married friends to join them for Christmas dinner. Instead, she spent Christmas Day circling San Francisco in a ferry, until the lights of the city brightened the gloomy dusk. When she got home, she re-read all of her husband’s letters.

Insecure about the love he had so recently won, it would have been natural for Dick to wonder whether Pat, alone in a big city, might turn to fancy big-city men for companionship, as she had done during their courtship. Dick asked her to write at the beginning of each letter that she loved him—“I always look first for that,” he told her. Such reassurance was a balm to a man who would never perceive any victory as permanent.

Dick need not have worried. Pat embraced the identity of the model wife left behind while her husband fought overseas, socializing little and making her own hats to save money. And she focused on her work ambition, eventually landing a good job as a price economist for the San Francisco division of the OPA. A friend there, Gretchen King, described Pat as “such a warm, happy, sparkling person. There were times when we must have seemed like a couple of high school youngsters, laughing, giggling, and thoroughly enjoying each other.”

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The Nixons in 1960 | AP Photo

When Americans remember the Nixon marriage, they focus on their highly publicized conflicts of the White House years. In fact, in many ways their bond fit the pattern of many midcentury American marriages. Few, if any, long partnerships consist of one unbroken spell of mutually sought intimacy; instead they stall and progress, with a couple’s closeness waxing and waning as one or the other copes with career disappointments or ventures out toward personal and professional goals that set them at some distance from each other. After dealing with a complex and unbalanced courtship (with Dick chasing a reluctant Pat), their happy early married years in California and the separation of wartime, the Nixons navigated through some of the most dramatic political crises in American history. They worked privately and publicly as a strong team during the Alger Hiss investigation in 1948, during the 1952 campaign in which Nixon’s famous Checkers speech redeemed his vice presidential candidacy after the press accused him of having an unethical political slush fund and they survived a close brush with death when their limousines were attacked by protesters in Venezuela on a 1958 goodwill tour.

They suffered through dark years in the early 1960s when Vice-President Nixon lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy by a small margin and when Nixon lost a gubernatorial campaign he had entered in California in 1962 against Pat’s advice. Their most painful period together was a stretch from 1973 until 1976, when they endured the humiliation and isolation of the Watergate investigation during their last two years in the White House, and then helped each other recover from life-threatening illnesses during their political exile in San Clemente after Nixon resigned from the presidency. Having managed all these difficult periods without drawing too far away from each other, they enjoyed 13 peaceful twilight years in New York and New Jersey, where he campaigned to restore his reputation and she rested on her reputation as a stellar first lady.

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Before returning home in early August 1944, Dick was awarded two battle stars and a commendation from his commanding officer “for meritorious and efficient duty.” Halfway through his 14 months of service in the South Pacific, Dick had imagined his reunion with his wife. “I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good. Will you mind such a public demonstration?” He flew from the South Pacific to Hawaii and then sailed to San Diego, calling Pat the moment he arrived and arranging to meet her at the airport. When Pat, dressed in a bright red dress (his favorite color for her), spotted Dick standing behind the airport fence, “her eyes lighted up,” Nixon remembered, “and she ran about 50 yards at breakneck speed and threw her arms around me.” It was no doubt the biggest and most joyful embrace of their married life.